Replies to This Discussion

Clearly, god is such a devious character that he emplaced photons en route to Earth so that it appears that there are stars and galaxies spread all across the Universe. Obviously, this is to test the faith of scientists to weed out non-believers. Well, at least that is the implications if we are to believe the nonsense from the young Earth creationists.

Based off conversations I've had .. They only seem to pay attention to the carbon (C14) dating and how inaccurate it is to date things beyond 60,000 years. They totally disregard the other types of radioactive dating.

It's also true that the C14 method needs calibrating. Which has been done. But they can use C14's need for calibration to try to argue that the method is inherently bogus.

Mineral dating (most famously U-238->Lead 206, but there are MANY others) doesn't have any of these problems and can date into the billions of years quite easily. Which is why the less clever creationists ignore it, and the more clever ones have to come up with additional bullshit arguments against it.

There is a quantum creation model that suggests the universe was created in a very small space, and then stretched rapidly to it's current size. That stretching caused a time dilation and through some rather creative inverting led to an old looking cosmos, but a young earth. Somehow the early days on earth actually equated to billions of years by modern standards while the later days of the (expanding) cosmos covered billions of years by modern standards. I can't remember the exact name of the theory or the author, but if you run across it then check it out - although it still leads to the oomphalos fallacy of last Thursdayism.